Jepson structured each interview to last no longer than an hour, during which he explored a woman’s personality and motives, doing so in the French language to test her fluency. As she entered his office, he “would see if she had the French look—dark hair, olive skin, and medium height.”
There were other qualities Jepson looked for. “Honesty and a sense of purpose and ability to okay instructions and issue orders. Leadership qualities and a total belief in what they were doing was important along with coolness and courage. But courage was not the absence of fear: it was the willingness to carry out actions which required taking a calculated risk while at the same being aware it would also endanger not only her own life but not put other lives in danger.”
To more easily learn about the women who sat opposite him in his office, he conducted interviews more as conversations. He sensed that when they entered his office they were filled with expectation. But apart from the wall poster there was nothing about him in his lounge suit to suggest he was in any way involved in the war. It was a presence he deliberately created to explore the qualities he was looking for: character and inner strength and a readiness to live near the edge of death under the Nazi jackboot.
His first questions explored why she had accepted the invitation to the interview. Background checks had shown that Anglo-French women were equally as loyal to Britain as to France. He discussed their own feelings about the German occupation. Would any relatives there be willing to help the Resistance? Jepson intended the questions would establish how far an interviewee would be committed. The majority answered that they were sure their relatives would join the struggle against the German occupation and the Vichy government.
He noticed many of the women came from either middle-class or slightly upper-class backgrounds, and their linguistic skills convinced him they could pass as native French. Jepson knew that if they completed their training they would be assigned to the SOE’s French Section, where language skills were essential for couriers and wireless operators.
When he was satisfied a woman had shown both her ability to speak French “like a native” and her British patriotism, he asked his key question: Was she willing to return to France after she had been specially trained for a mission where she would learn to kill and would face death at the hands of the Gestapo if captured?
Jepson had discussed with Vera Atkins how far he should go in dealing with the mistreatment a woman agent could expect if captured. They had agreed that how an agent looked and dressed would be an essential part of their clandestine work as couriers to allow them to operate in a world where German soldiers manned road checkpoints and Gestapo officers traveled on trains to check tickets.
At the end of every interview Jepson asked each woman the same question: Did she really want to be trained? If she said she did, he handed her a copy of the Official Secrets Act and reminded her of the penalties of prosecution and jail she faced if she broke it.
With a handshake at the door he said she would hear shortly whether she had been selected for training.
In the two years that Jepson had been the SOE’s recruiting officer, he had interviewed over seventy women. The majority had successfully passed their training. Thirty-nine would be parachuted into France and thirteen dropped into Holland and Belgium.
In New York, Dulles interviewed Eleanor Grecay Weis in his office at 630 Fifth Avenue. The blue-uniformed guard in the lobby telephoned Dulles to confirm her arrival, and he had been waiting to greet her with a friendly smile at the door. There was still the maturity and poise in her voice he had detected on the tape in response to his advertisement. She glanced around to see if there was anything about him or his office that offered a clue to what the job could be. He asked her about her work as a dentist’s receptionist and said working for him would be different. She asked him in what way? He suspected her experience of job hunting had taught her to ask questions at the outset of an interview.
He said her work would involve the war. The OSS had been created to analyze and correlate all information and data relating to national security. Its most secret work was to wage unorthodox war in support of the armed forces and would include sabotage and subversion to assist the French Resistance fighting the Nazis. She asked another question. What did he want her to do?
Dulles explained she would set up a filing system, handle the switchboard, and log all calls. Other women would be recruited; a number would be émigrés who would work with her. Later they would be transferred to other OSS offices in the city once she was satisfied they showed an English language capability in writing reports on the countries they had emigrated from. She was to bring the reports to him before she filed them. Everything she read must be kept secret. Dulles sensed the proposition appealed to her sense of patriotism and taste for adventure.
On the same floor of the building, William Stephenson ran his British intelligence operation. He wore a suit so shapeless it did not appear to be his own. He had adopted the American penchant for informality and would call the OSS, “Oh, So Secret.” In turn Dulles, with whom he had established a close relationship, would call him “Our Friend.” They would exchange messages and documents by pneumatic tubes, which Dulles had installed in their offices. It reminded Weis of how Macy’s staff sent sales details to the accounts department.
In her own office outside Dulles’s suite, she became used to the sound of messages coming from and going to Stephenson’s suite at the far end of the floor. He would regularly stride into her office and, in his soft Canadian accent, tell her it was going to be another long day before opening and closing the door of Dulles’s office behind him.
Often the red button on her phone would flash for her to connect Dulles with OSS headquarters in Washington, and she would put the call through to the deep Irish voice she had heard on the radio that Sunday morning saying “smart people can handle any job.”
Since then she had seen Donovan as he had walked into Dulles’s office. “He had a quiet unassuming manner and I realized that I was working for a man like no other,” she would later recall.
On his visits to New York, Donovan discussed with Dulles the expansion of the OSS in the city. Research and Analysis had an office at 55 West Fifty-Third Street to catalog and assess photographs that could be used in planning subversive operations. Morale Operations was housed on Times Square, where its staff created “black” propaganda against Germany and Japan.
X-2, the Counterintelligence Branch, had its office on the West Side of Manhattan, where a number of women were engaged in building up backgrounds on personalities, various industries, and ongoing political developments in European countries.
At 610 Fifth Avenue was another OSS office that was simply marked at its entrance as UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. It was the Biographical Records Division.
It had been formed to obtain intelligence, mostly about Germany, from émigrés arriving in New York, among the last to have Nazi exit visas. The majority were Jews. Among the first staff recruited to work in Biographical Records was Emma Crisler Rado, an attractive, dark-haired, Swiss-born wife of a New York psychologist with a busy practice. He knew Donovan and had recommended that his wife could make a good interviewer.
She had become one of the section’s most skilled interviewers, using the methods her husband told her worked with his own patients: “Let the subject talk about himself or herself. It makes them feel good and loosens their tongues. Be a good listener. Don’t take notes; it will intimidate interviewees. Tell them that what they are saying was of interest.” Using those methods, she had learned a great deal about life in Germany.
Over the weeks, men and women were referred by Emma Rado to Biographical Records to be interviewed for jobs in one of the other OSS offices being set up around New York. The candidates would be taken to a waiting room to be called for an interview. A team of linguists who spoke French, Dutch, Italian, and German were seeking those who not only had knowledge of foreign affairs but were suitable to be selected for the traini
ng camps that the OSS had opened in Maryland and Virginia. The sixteen-week courses were run by instructors who had been transferred from the SOE’s Camp X in Canada, which had opened on December 6, 1941. They taught how to pick locks, take photographs without being spotted, and piece together small scraps of documents retrieved from trash baskets.
Eloise Page, Donovan’s secretary, was one of the few in OSS headquarters in Washington who knew where he could be reached in an emergency; she would tell other staff wanting to contact him that “he is where he needs to be.” She became known as “Hush-Hush.” At the end of her day she would send him a list of callers.
When Donovan went with Stephenson to London to discuss matters connected with their clandestine collaboration, they first headed to Bermuda. There, Page reserved seats 4 and 5 in first class on the Pan Am 314 Clipper flying boat that made the twenty-two-hour journey from Bermuda to Lisbon. From Lisbon, they flew to London. Donovan traveled under the name of Donald Williams and Stephenson as Michael O’Connell. Page had concluded the seat numbers and aliases were part of the secret lives they both lived.
Part of that secrecy was connected with Bermuda. The island was Britain’s oldest overseas territory, with a long tradition of self-government, and had become a key satellite in Stephenson’s networks since the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had intensified. The devastating losses from submarine attacks on convoys—twenty-nine ships sunk in one night with vital supplies—was destroying the lifeline that Roosevelt had promised Churchill at their meeting in Washington.
To make their deadly patrols in the Atlantic, U-boats were returning to and going from their bases on the French coast at Brest, Saint-Nazaire, and La Rochelle. By 1941 there were thirty-five short-range submarines and twenty-two newly delivered long-range submarines able to stay at sea for over a week. Château de Pignerolle at Saint-Barthélemy-d’Anjou became their communication center. From there Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz commanded the submarines. With better U-boats equipped with improved torpedoes, his operational plans had increased the number of kills, which had a serious effect on the British economy. On December 11, 1941, following Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, Dönitz launched his Unternehmen Paukenschlag, Operation Drumbeat, to target merchant ships sailing from the east coast of the United States and Canada. The US Navy, unprepared for antisubmarine warfare, depended on the Royal Navy and the Canadian Navy to prevent shipping losses.
Churchill and Roosevelt knew the vital importance of maintaining control of the sea lanes. The prime minister had told the War Cabinet, “It is the dominating fact of the war. Never for a moment must we forget that everything that happens elsewhere on land, or in the air, depends ultimately on winning the Battle of the Atlantic.”
The entry of the United States into the war had increased the opportunity for U-boats as now there were many more convoys leaving New York and the East Coast of America for Europe. Often mist reduced visibility to a few hundred yards, making it difficult for ships’ lookouts to spot a periscope in the towering waves. The sudden explosion of torpedoes striking, followed by the sinking of a ship and the screams of men drowning in icy water, could be heard in the night. The U-boat crews themselves received news on each convoy via the highly sophisticated cipher machine that every submarine carried. It was called Enigma.
It had a keyboard resembling a typewriter, and the keys were connected in a complex arrangement of wiring to drums inside the machine. If the message included the letter A, a drum would change it to a Z. B would become a Y. The permutation of letters could be endless. Only a U-boat commander knew how to decode the message by adjusting the settings of the drums. The Enigma’s codes were regarded as unbreakable.
The machine was invented after the First World War by Arthur Scherbius, a gifted mathematician in Berlin, who sold it as “a secret writing machine.” In the early 1920s banks and other financial institutions around Europe bought copies; the Vatican used it to communicate in Latin with nuncios, the Holy See’s diplomats stationed around the world. The American ambassador in Berlin sent a machine to Henry Stimson, the new secretary of state in Washington, and received a curt response: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
The German Navy was the first military branch to adopt Enigma, introducing it into service in 1926. By 1928 the German army had introduced its own version, the Enigma G, updated in 1930. The addition of a plugboard greatly increased its cryptographic strength, and additional complexity was repeatedly added to the military Enigma machines, making decryption more and more difficult. Each rotor could be set to one of twenty-six possible positions. Codebooks were printed in red, water-soluble ink on pink paper, so they could easily be destroyed if a U-boat was endangered and captured.
But in the summer of 1938, the Polish Army cryptology unit had been working to develop its skill of reading Wehrmacht code traffic, and had found reasons to fear that Hitler planned to invade their country.
In 1938 the Polish Army had not yet been ready to share its secrets on Enigma with British codebreakers. But a well-placed agent inside Warsaw would help.
Betty Pack’s marriage to British diplomat Arthur Pack had suffered a terrible blow when he was transferred to Warsaw. Arthur Pack blamed what he saw as his wife’s personal and political indiscretions in Spain. He had no idea that Betty not only was keeping a succession of love affairs from him but also was reporting back to British Naval Intelligence. She had already come to the attention of the SIS, and Arthur’s transfer to Warsaw might well have been an excuse to move her to an area of Europe that, in the summer of 1937, was fast becoming an important place to have a cool and effective spy. Betty was twenty-seven when she arrived in Warsaw that September, young and vivacious, with a reputation for fun. Her easy manner with men made her disliked by the conservative diplomats and hostesses with whom she mixed in Warsaw, but it would make her an agent of real importance to the SIS. Her work in the Polish capital would have a real effect on the outcome of the war.
On New Year’s Eve 1937, her husband suffered a stroke. Betty nursed him with care, and in February 1938 they visited England, where Arthur would stay to convalesce. Betty returned to Warsaw alone, and within a few weeks her double life of sexual and international intrigue had moved into a new gear.
Living across from the Packs’ apartment in the diplomatic quarter of the city was a handsome young diplomat named Edward Kulikowski who worked at the Polish Foreign Office. Over suppers of caviar, picnics by the Vistula, and nights of passion in Kulikowski’s small apartment, Pack gently questioned her lover about Poland’s foreign policies toward its German neighbor.
One night Kulikowski let slip about a possible Polish agreement with Germany in which Warsaw would receive a small area of Czechoslovakia, known as Teschen, in return for acquiescing to Hitler’s planned annexation of the Sudetenland. The next morning Pack relayed the conversation with the British embassy’s passport control officer, Jack Shelley, who found the information fascinating and instructed her to immediately find out more. Lieutenant Colonel Shelley was the SIS’s senior officer in Poland. From then on Pack received a monthly stipend from the service’s funds.
Suspicious that the vulnerable Poles might be seeking to make further deals with Hitler, Shelley asked her to increase her contacts with senior Polish diplomats and politicians. Very quickly, she made what would be a vital contact at the American embassy when she found herself seated at a sumptuous dinner next to Count Michael Lubienski, the Polish foreign minister’s senior advisor. As the guests moved from the dining room to the glittering ballroom, Pack, realizing that the count had access to the highest levels of secret documents, gave him her undivided attention. He was similarly transfixed, and next morning a bouquet of roses arrived at her apartment. That night Pack made love to the married count.
As the pair became increasingly inseparable, she began to gently inquire about his work. As she later said, she was always surprised at how easy “close-mouthed patriots give away secrets in bed.”
>
Through her affair with Lubienski, she garnered information about Enigma. The Poles had obtained early commercial versions of Enigma and were by far the most advanced in understanding how it worked. The SIS knew the Germans planned to make Enigma their central method of message transmission and that breaking its cipher would be of utmost importance in a coming conflict. Lubienski’s boss, Foreign Minister Józef Beck, was kept up-to-date with all developments on Enigma, and Lubienski himself had sight of these secret reports. Through her passionate relationship with him, Pack was able to pass Shelley confirmation that the Poles had been able to read some Enigma traffic, the details of the Polish cryptanalysis unit, and the fact that the Poles had been able to manufacture some of the machines.
Pack sensed how enormously important it would be for Polish cryptanalysts to be able to intercept secret messages from within the German High Command to its generals whose troops were beginning to amass close to the Polish border.
She told Shelley that her lover had told her that the Polish cryptanalysts had learned that the Wehrmacht had a machine, called a radiotelegraph, which would encode a typed message to be sent over the airwaves and decoded by a machine at the receiving end.
In his report to London, Shelley wrote, “It means more traffic and codes for your end to break.”
From Britain, where plans were developing to create a code-breaking center in a Buckinghamshire mansion called Bletchley Park, came a priority response: “Send more.”
Pack’s information had reached London months before Polish intelligence officially shared some of its knowledge of Enigma with Britain. While Britain’s cryptanalysts were beginning to consider the information sourced on Enigma from Pack and other intelligence routes, Shelley brought her to the attention of Colin Gubbins. Gubbins, in turn, mentioned her to William Stephenson, who quickly realized he had an effective, if unorthodox, agent right at the heart of the unfolding events in Europe. Instructed to stick close to Lubienski, Pack even went to Berlin with him when he made a trip there on official business in September 1938. Lubienski had orders from Warsaw to travel to Nuremburg, where he was to be the Polish representative at the Nazi Party Day rally. Pack kissed him good-bye in Berlin; she had secret orders of her own.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 11
